Hosting Overview

The hosting of your website involves some of the most critical decisions you will make regarding your Internet presence. Speed of access, functionality and reliability are only a few of the important factors that make Hosting co-equal in importance to your site's Production and Promotion. Together, these three areas form the pillars of your website's stability and, by extension, its potential for success.

Space vs Need
A quick note regarding the manner in which TechSpeed determines its Internet hosting fees is appropriate. Most companies place a lot of emphasis on the amount of server space (MB) that they provide to their customers. We don't. Rather, we use a system based on several factors, including the number of pages (for non-domain accounts) and the need for certain technical features. We offer ample space and more is available if needed. But again, we do not emphasize this aspect.

One of the problems with per megabyte hosting fees is that they are significantly misleading. By and large, space is cheap. And while a lot of space looks good, it's usually impractical, because it's not in your best interest to use it. Large files that take up a lot of space on a server (the remote computer where your files reside), are in fact counter-productive -- they take longer to download. On the other hand, optimizing your files correctly (particularly your graphics) will automatically translate to smaller files, which means faster downloads and, by extension, fewer people canceling their visits.

So, while a lot of disk space may look impressive, it's often a smoke-screen for inferior service. We feel it is much more important to offer state-of-the-art high-speed servers, reliable backbone connections and rich standard features than to place a lot of weight on the amount of space being offered. Consider this: Our average client site is under 400 kilobytes and all but a very few can fit on a single floppy disk! So, unless you have the need for a rather exhaustive site (say, 50 pages or more), you will probably never need more than a few megabytes of space.

All TechSpeed domain packages come with Five MB of space -- along with all of our other standard features -- and non-domain accounts are allowed an average of up to 100 KB per page! (single page sites can go as high as 200 KB). If more space is needed, it's always available at a very modest increase.

Who's Doing What?
In connection, you should try to determine ahead of time what you intend to handle yourself. If you plan on doing everything personally, you will need full access to your site, including FTP for file transfers. All domain accounts come with these features at no additional charge (for extension sites, you will need to select the appropriate options). If you are not planning to handle any of the production or technical work yourself and do not need to have personal access to the server, then that may be one more argument for going with an extension site as opposed to your own unique domain (provided you haven't ruled this out on other grounds).